Health & Fitness
The 7th Annual Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival Honors Talent Close to Home
The Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival provides a means for self-expression and creativity for area young people, and builds community through arts and literature.
Fort Greene Park and its surrounding neighborhoods have a rich literary tradition. Both Richard Wright and Marianne Moore lived nearby and wrote in the park. Walt Whitman was a driving force for the creation of the park. Drawing upon these roots, The Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival provides a means for self-expression and creativity for area young people, and builds community through arts and literature.
The 7th annual Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival will present a free outdoor reading on August 20th at 3:00 PM featuring young writers (seven to eighteen-year-olds) reading alongside five of Brooklyn's most celebrated writers, including Rick Moody (The Ice Storm, The Four Fingers of Death). This exciting event brings several generations of writers together to build on the history of the neighborhoods surrounding beautiful Fort Greene Park.
The festival’s young writers are participants in a free summer-long series of creative writing workshops that take place outdoors in the park. The dynamic and innovative workshops provide 7 to12-year-olds and teenagers a safe space to find their voices and explore all genres of creative writing. “It’s been thrilling to see young writers grow up in front of our eyes for the last seven years of our free workshops. Many of the kids are now Lit Fest veterans and have read alongside some of the country’s best writers,” said Aaron Zimmerman, Founder and Executive Director of NY Writers Coalition, a not-for-profit organization that runs the workshops. “This year’s lineup of Brooklyn All-Stars will show our next generation of writers that their talent and words actually do matter.”
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Festival organizers urge every New Yorker to join them on Saturday, August 20th for some late-afternoon shade, poems and prose in Fort Greene Park! Should the weather take a rainy turn, we will relocate to the cozy independent Greenlight Bookstore (located on 686 Fulton Street). This is also where we'll have the after-party where people can mingle with the fabulous readers.
The Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival is presented by Akashic Books, the Fort Greene Park Conservancy, Greenlight Bookstore, GTHQ and NY Writers Coalition with additional support from Amazon.com and The Walt Whitman Project. Sponsors include Amazon.com, Brooklyn Community Foundation, City Council Member Letitia James, NYC Department of Parks & Recreation, TwoWest Foundation and the Union Square Awards.
